Heavenly spiced chicken, the freshest I’ve ever eaten, wrapped in filo dough made moments before we bought it in the souk, baked until golden and drizzled in honey. The chicken b’stilla we made during a fabulous cooking lesson turned out to be the best amongst the many marvellous Moroccan foods we sampled.
We ate well throughout our 12-day visit: tajines, mint tea, tanjias, couscous, grilled lamb and chicken, a wide array of breakfast breads, more mint tea, salads, falafel, sweets, fruit drinks, a camel burger and, yes, even more mint tea.
No wonder we ate well. Moroccan cuisine is an artful blend of the many cultures that crossed through this land and left their marks: indigenous Berbers, Arabs, Andalusian (southern Spain), Jewish, French, British, and African spice traders.
But our cooking lesson in Fes, expertly led by chef Souad, highlighted our alimentary adventure that had begun with the traditional mint tea ceremony in Marrakech, took us through the markets (souks) and culinary museum, and ended with dinner at dreamy Rick’s Café in Casablanca. Despite my allergies and a galloping ride on the porcelain pony one night, we loved Moroccan food.
Moroccan mint tea ceremony
The higher the pour, the higher the respect for the guest.
Ahmed warmly welcomed us at our first riad (like a bed-and-breakfast inn) and showed us into the traditional open-air central courtyard. We sat on pillow-strewn benches around a low table, gawking at the carved plasterwork and zillij (tiles), and he brought us mint tea.
Everywhere you go – not just riads, but also restaurants and cafés, souks, argan oil shops, traditional pharmacies, Berber rug emporiums, Sahara Desert camps, and hammams – you’re offered mint tea. And it’s not just boiled water poured over dried mint leaves.
The Moroccan mint tea ceremony – including its preparation, serving and drinking – symbolizes hospitality. That’s why it’s considered rude to refuse, so we drank gallons of it during our visit.
It’s a blend of gunpowder green tea (introduced by the British), plus sugar and a lot of fresh mint. And I mean a lot! I peeked inside one teapot to see it stuffed full of mint stems and leaves.
Here’s how it’s made: the green tea is placed in a silver teapot, boiling water poured over, then the pot stuffed full of fresh mint leaves. Sugar cubes are added and then the concoction steeps. When ready, the tea is poured into the small tea glasses from on high, then poured back into the pot. This mixes the sugar and helps aerate the tea, creating the desired foam. Then it’s poured from the teapot on high again – the higher the pour, the more respect is shown to the guests – and served on a silver tray. Although some tea glasses are plain, most are coloured glass with beautiful designs; some look like they were wrapped in metal lace.
You’re supposed to sip slowly, compliment the foam or freshness of the mint, and thank the host – which we did, earning wide smiles.
Nicknamed “Moroccan whiskey,” the tea usually came with cookies I couldn’t eat due to allergies, so Bill scored there.
We experienced everything from the ceremonial high pour right down to oversweet premade stuff already in tea glasses with nary a teapot in sight. Most of it was quite good. The only time I didn’t like it was near the end of a pot, when it became bitter. That happened no matter how well it was made.
Usually, I can’t have caffeine after 2 p.m. or I can’t sleep. Not wanting to offend anyone, I had mint tea as late as 6 p.m. but never had trouble falling asleep. So, my scientific observation is that it’s not as highly caffeinated as described.
Allergies limited me
Food stalls in the markets offered ready-made spreads and dips (left), preserved lemons (right) and countless types of olives.
A word here about my food allergies. I´ve travelled in a lot of countries but Morocco was the first where my allergies really constrained my food choices. Moroccan food excels at ingredients that make me itchy and nauseous: lentils, garbanzo beans (chickpeas) and green peas. That’s on top of my death-inducing, anaphylactic peanut allergy.
Anticipating language barriers, I wrote a note explaining my allergies and translated it into French and Arabic. I asked Ahmed to review the Arabic, since you can’t always trust translation apps. He approved it, so I kept the note in my purse and showed it to restaurant servers. They perused my note in depth, asked questions, and often took it to the kitchen to show the cook.
“No salads,” said the server in the grilled lamb place in the Marrakech medina. Darn.
However, that still left a long list of delicious foods to enjoy, and for Bill to sample in my stead. He indulged in falafels and most of my sweets, which often contained almonds or pistachios that may have encountered peanuts.
And speaking of health, I did spend a glorious few hours in the bathroom during our first night in Fes. (Nothing to do with allergies.) Suffice it to say I was fully prepped for a colonoscopy, should the need have presented itself.
I recovered quickly after taking the wonder drug Imodium, as well as a tea made by our riad host, who was very concerned about me. Bill was fine, so it was probably something I ate, despite being careful about washing hands, using Purell, and drinking bottled water.
Tajines, couscous, camel burger, fig smoothie and more
Our first Moroccan dinner featured falafel nuggets (left) with lots of vegetables for Bill, and a delicious, tender camel burger for me.
Before going to Morocco, the only dishes I knew were chicken tajine and couscous. So I wanted to dive right in to discovering local foods. But on our first evening, I dithered, seriously, over ordering the famed camel burger at the Clock Café in Marrakech. I love camels, but I also like trying new tastes. I can report that camel is delicious. Like tender beef.
We do enjoy wine, beer and cider, but Morocco is essentially an alcohol-free country, save for a few upscale hotels and restaurants with special licences. Instead, we tasted a wide variety of fruit drinks, along with mint tea, sparkling water, and coffee.
That first evening, my fig smoothie had an orangey background flavour without being sweet. To accompany his falafel bowl, Bill had fresh orange juice – refreshing in the April heat. We later sipped drinks made from strawberries, lemon, mint, banana, and even avocado.
Over the next 11 days, we sampled as many different Moroccan foods as we could.
Couscous dishes are always artfully presented, this one with fingers of pumpkin, carrot, potato and zucchini, topped with caramelized onions and raisins.
Tajines are stews of vegetables and meat or fish cooked on the stovetop in a conical terra cotta pot with a wide base called a tajine (also spelled “tagine”). Decorative tajines are just for serving. Meats include rabbit, beef, chicken, goat, lamb or fish. After perusing my allergy note, servers invariably recommended the chicken tajine with preserved lemons for me, since it was usually the only one without chickpeas. I tried many versions. It became my signature dish.
Tanjia meatstews are cooked slowly in an urn-shaped terra cotta pot called a tanjia (also spelled “tangia”). This saffron-spiced meat dish (often lamb or ox, including the bones) originated in Marrakech. It’s cooked for four hours in the ashes of a wood-fired oven – often in the hammam furnace rooms supervised by men.
“There are two conflicting origin story [sic] as it is a dish prepared by men,” said a pamphlet I picked up. “Some say that they are the only ones to master its preparation. Others say it’s the only dish simple enough for them to master.”
Couscous – another vegetable and meat stew, but served over a pile of fluffy couscous – takes three hours to prepare so it’s usually eaten on Fridays after prayers. They always seemed to include chickpeas, so servers nixed my desire to try it. Bill enjoyed a vegetable couscous topped with caramelized onions and raisins.
My Marrakech lunch of chicken kebab, salad and strawberry smoothie, overlooking Jemaa el-Fna square, hit the spot.
Grilled meats, such as lamb and chicken, were usually served with fries and a salad. We skipped the beef liver skewers. We tended to trust salads served in reputable, clean-looking restaurants.
Street foods of many types were everywhere. Bread pockets stuffed with various meat and vegetable mixtures, fresh fruit drinks, harira and bissara soups, kefta (spiced meatball) brochettes, and countless sweet and savoury pastries. Somehow, we missed the famous snail soup stand in the enormous Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech. I would have tried that.
B’stilla (also spelled “bstilla” or “pastilla”) is a wrapped sweet-and-savoury filo dough hand pie stuffed with spiced meat, fish or vegetables. We didn’t encounter b’stilla until our cooking lesson, but it leaped ahead of chicken tajine to become my absolute favourite!
Apart from familiar greens, Morocco offered a wide range of salads with cooked ingredients, such as zaalouk (smokey eggplant), khizou (marinated carrots), shlada d l’barba (beets), and taktouka (grilled and spiced green peppers). I tried as many as I could, and loved them.
Breakfast breads became an intriguing guessing game of cooking methods and ingredients.
Breakfast proved to include a wide array of breads, some fried, some baked – on which to spread butter, honey, fig jam, and cheese – a fresh white cheese and, surprisingly, triangles of Laughing Cow cheese. We found msemen everywhere, including at street carts in the morning, and I’d learned its name before we left Morocco; other breads, I had to look up later to confirm.
- Msemen is a square, dense fried flat bread, sometimes quite oily.
- Baghrir is a soft semolina pancake with holes like a crumpet.
- Harsha is a crisp flatbread with the outside look of an English muffin.
- Khobz is a puffy round of whole wheat, often studded with cracked wheat or sesame seeds.
- Batbout, cooked in a dry pan, expands to form a stuffable pocket, like pita bread.
The French influence tilted Casablanca breakfast breads towards croissants and baguettes. Fried eggs and omelets added more protein to start the day, plus fresh orange juice, coffee, and mint tea.
Moroccan food ingredients
Although we learned a lot about Moroccan ingredients, some remained mysterious. Rose petals? Rosewater is used in many desserts, so I assumed she was making her own.
Anticipating our cooking lesson later in Fes, we paid attention to Moroccan ingredients while wandering through the souks (markets) in the medina (old, narrow-laned neighbourhood) with our walking tour guide Mustapha.
While many herbs and spices were familiar – ginger, paprika, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, saffron, oregano, cayenne – we encountered variations. Pepper, for example, came in a long, mini-pinecone-looking version. And saffron – an expensive, exotic ingredient in Canada – is an everyday staple in Morocco, akin to salt and pepper.
Mustapha took us to a traditional pharmacy – unlike any pharmacy I’ve been in before. There, traditional pharmacist Zechariah walked us through various products for sale and the ailments they cured.
- Herbal tea mixes can help with stress, sleeplessness, inflammation, diarrhea, psoriasis, migraines.
- Spice blends like lemon-curry or lemon-ginger-turmeric are anti-inflammatories.
- The 35-spice mix is known as the “lazy cook” spice.
- Saffron helps the memory – dementia prevention, if you will.
“This is why Moroccans speak five languages easily,” Zechariah joked. But he cautioned to buy saffron in whole strands; don’t buy it as a powder because it’s often cut with paprika. Real saffron floats in water and turns yellow. And of course – I forgot! – it’s good in many Moroccan food dishes.
Argan oil can be used for cooking, not just massage oil or in body lotion or shampoo. For cooking, the nut kernels are toasted first; the resulting oil tastes somewhat like toasted sesame oil. We tasted it later at an argan oil shop where we stopped on our road trip to the Sahara Desert. We also tasted argan oil mixed with ground almonds and honey, often spread on breakfast breads. Delicious!
We saw many baskets of rose petals. Rosewater is used in many desserts, as well as (I learned later) drinks, couscous, tajines and salads.
We walked past lemons already preserved for my lemon chicken, premade dips and spreads, and countless types of olives and olive oil.
Like many countries where we’ve wandered amongst food stalls, we saw body parts and products not often encountered in Canadian markets, including beef hoofs, spleen made into sausage, animal heads, and buckets of preserved meat in fat, no fridge needed.
Culinary museum, Marrakech
The culinary museum displayed spices, dried flowers, and herbs used in Moroccan dishes.
The Moroccan Culinary Art Museum not only helped us learn more about Moroccan food but also showcased the beautiful architecture of its setting in a renovated 18th-century palace. We admired the sculpted plaster arches and columns, elaborately tiled floors, decorative friezes, marble fountains, and carved cedar railings, corbels, ceilings and display cases.
Circling two magnificent inner courtyards on three levels, the exhibits explained the country’s culinary history and heritage, with maps to show where certain dishes originated. Videos showed cooking techniques – for couscous, tajines, breads, and gazelle horns (a pastry). Displays featured tableware, antique pots and pans, tajines and tanjias, samovars, teapots, and spice scales.
One room had a table laid with spices in bowls. We sauntered its length, sniffing to test our noses’ abilities at identification.
The culinary museum teaching kitchen has 34 cooking stations set up for lessons.
We wandered into the teaching kitchen and admired the high-end set-up. Each of the 34 cooking stations had its own sink, stove, prep area, pretty tajines filled with spices, and a screen to show what the teacher was doing at her worktop at the far end of the room. If we hadn’t already booked our cooking lesson in Fes, this would have been a great alternative.
To conclude our informative visit, we rested in the elegant tea salon to enjoy a ceremonial mint tea (included with our entry ticket). The pour was high, the tea refreshing, and the setting lovely. We watched a teenage kitten tentatively approach the star-shaped central fountain and lap water.
Cooking lesson with Souad
Souad (right, with Bill) took us to the souk, where we bought a very fresh chicken to make our b’stilla.
We wound our way through the labyrinthine Fes medina to the Clock Café (also in Marrakech and Chefchaouen) for our much-anticipated cooking lesson. Souad, our smiley, fun-loving chef, greeted us, and made sure we had mint tea to sip as we perused the recipe book. We were the only participants that day, so we chose all the dishes ourselves.
Souad jotted a shopping list (writing right to left in Arabic) for our choices: zaalouk (smokey eggplant salad), chicken b’stilla, and ghriba d l’kouk (Fes-style coconut macaroons).
“Can we keep the recipe book?”
“If you pass the test!” She grinned, grabbed her straw basket and we set off for the souk.
At butcher stalls, we examined lamb and beef that had been slaughtered, in the halal method, just that morning. Meat isn’t hung for days here, she said. “We like it fresh.” At midnight, anything unsold is minced and mixed with herbs and spices to make kefta.
Moroccans have a saying that the butcher eats turnip, she said. I told her the English equivalent: “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes.” She liked that.
At the chicken booth, white chickens bobbled their way amongst sawdust behind the counter. The chicken man placed a chicken, still alive, on the scales and weighed it. Then, in a flash, he wrung its neck and stuck it head down in a pail of water. My eyes widened. I peered behind the counter to see the chicken’s yellow feet sticking out of the pail. I gulped. I’d never had chicken quite that… fresh. We went off to buy vegetables while he plucked, gutted and cut it up for us.
Souad showed us piles of tiny croutons flavoured with herbs, chili powder or sweets. When a busybody comes to visit (such as your mother-in-law) you give her a bowl to snack on “to keep her mouth busy.”
At the filo pastry booth, a woman spread the batter with her bare hand over a rounded, very hot iron plate over a gas burner. Wow! Her hands must be made of asbestos!
“Hurt?” I ask. “So-so” she replied with her hands.
After picking up our chicken, we returned to the Clock Café’s teaching kitchen and commenced cooking. Although many methods of preparation and cooking were familiar, some were new:
- Since the chicken was so fresh, she soaked it in a mix of vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and water.
- She had us grate garlic cloves without peeling them.
- She grilled the eggplants and red pepper right over the gas burner, turning them with her bare (asbestos) fingers.
She “measured” oil by the number of glugs, reminding me of my mother, who adds ingredients “until it looks right” or smells right or tastes right.
We ate our zaalouk (eggplant dip) with a spicy bread (left, at front), khobz (the seedy bread), fresh cheese and olives. Our light coconut macaroons paired splendidly with strawberries.
While we chopped, grated, peeled, shredded, wrapped and rolled, she invited us to ask her anything about Morocco and its culture. We chatted about food, meal times, school hours, holy days, holidays, family traditions, dreams, and her son, who is studying engineering in Spain and misses his favourite Moroccan food – b’stilla.
Souad interspersed our kitchen tasks with tests. She handed us a bowl filled with whole spices and challenged us to identify at least four. I felt under pressure but soon realized we knew more than we thought. We identified ginger, nutmeg, regular black peppercorns, long peppercorns, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, and rose peppercorns.
Our final test: recall all the spices we’d described in our videos four hours ago. Good news! We passed, so we got to take home the recipe book.
After our delicious chicken b’stilla emerged golden from the oven, Souad drizzled honey and sprinkled cinnamon overtop.
B’stilla takes time to prepare so, at home, Souad makes extra to freeze and then reheats them in the air fryer.
Finally, ours was baked until golden and cool enough to eat. The sweet flavours of honey and cinnamon, combined with the savoury turmeric and ginger, made the taste simply divine. Well worth the wait.
We saved room for our tender macaroons, which paired perfectly with fresh strawberries. What a wonderful culmination to our delicious day.
Sweets
Much like Greece or the Middle East, Moroccan desserts include a wide variety of baklava-type concoctions with pistachios and honey.
I couldn’t eat most desserts since nuts featured prominently. Coffee and mint tea often came with a cookie or sweet on the side. Bill took one for the team – actually, many – and ate all mine.
Apart from sticky toffee pudding one evening and the macaroons we made with Souad, my only dessert was sliced oranges and bananas sprinkled with cinnamon and arranged artfully on a plate. (We laughed. My mother has always served banana-and-orange salad when there’s no better dessert to be had. But she’s never added cinnamon…) Like lemon chicken, it became my signature dessert.
We snacked on delectable medjool dates. Orange-and-banana salad became my signature dessert, since I usually couldn’t eat the cookies.
But I didn’t lack for sweet treats.
On our drive to the Sahara, we saw people selling honey at stands by the side of the road. Natural, wild honey made by bees who feed on flowers, our guide Ismail assured us. What other kinds were there? Some places feed bees with sugar, from fruit, he said.
In the town of Erfoud, we stopped for Medjool dates. Oh my! So sweet and soft and tender and almost creamy; no dry pith in them like dates I’ve eaten elsewhere. And big! We bought a large box and snacked on them for the rest of our trip.
Play it, Sam
We were shocked, SHOCKED, to find no gambling going on when we walked into Rick’s Café.
As our time in Morocco went by, we found ourselves in Casablanca at Rick’s Café – a tribute to the café that never was. The 1942 movie “Casablanca” was filmed entirely on set in Hollywood. But American diplomat Kathy Kriger loved the movie so much that she opened Rick’s in 2004. It’s not a recreation of the movie saloon but rather inspired by it.
Certainly, the architectural details and atmosphere were dreamy: pointed arches, white balconies looking down into the central courtyard, sculpted plaster trim, palm trees, a beautiful wooden bar, a winding staircase perfect for dramatic descents, and striking lighting cast by beaded and stenciled brass lamps. Rick, Ilsa and Sam would feel at home.
It may sound completely cheesy, but we loved our dinner at Rick’s, with its superb food, service and ambiance. It was quite thrilling to have dinner in almost a movie set.
Plus, it was the only place in 12 days where we had alcohol.
Our dinner accompanist sang “As Time Goes By” in Spanish.
I ordered a Gin Ricky (gin, lime juice and club soda) because, well, what else would you have? Apparently a Sour Jdid – Bill enjoyed the house cocktail, a mix of Red Label scotch, red vermouth, mashed lemon slices, and a splash of sparking water.
We shared an appetizer of goat cheese with fig, arugula, lettuce and a honey dressing, with some smoky undertones. My entrée was the lamb chops while Bill had salmon – all perfectly prepared and elegantly presented.
Our table in the central courtyard was near the bar and faced the grand piano. Partway through our meal, a pianist began his set with “As Time Goes By,” crooning in Spanish. How perfectly wonderful! He followed that with classics like “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Besame Mucho,” and “Blue Moon.” The music perfected the atmosphere, making the experience so much more vivid.
Although we went to Rick’s Café for the experience, we found the food delicious.
As we ate and listened, we played a game. From a list of the movie’s famous quotations, I read the first word and Bill filled in the rest. For example:
- “Round… up the usual suspects.”
- “Of… all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
- “Here’s… looking at you, kid.”
- “Kiss… me as if it were the last time.”
He passed.
Based on my allergy note, the waiter wouldn’t let me have dessert. But the problems of one little food lover didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy culinary world.
I had another Gin Ricky instead.
We visited Morocco in April 2026. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.
